Ever since Microsoft announced Windows 11 almost four years ago, there has been significant controversy on a fairly regular basis about stringent hardware requirements that need to be met in order to legitimately run the operating system. A major concern revolved around the fact that Windows 11 mandates TPM 2.0, something that is not present in older processors, rendering otherwise perfectly fine PCs obsolete.

When an average person purchased a Windows 10 PC years ago, they did not ask the retailer if the hardware also included TPM. The customer may care about Windows Hello in their potential purchase, they don’t care about how it’s more secure through TPM 2.0. This technology, while useful, doesn’t matter to your regular home user. Most people don’t utilize or even know about BitLocker encryption, in fact, they’d probably be more concerned about the performance hit that could result from disk encryption.

The common Windows 11 user assumes that the operating system’s security is built-in, and as long as they have a secure password that allows them to login to their PC and use it, they should be fine.